I asked influencers to edit my selfies and turn me into an entirely different person, and it just reminded me how damaging it is to chase an unattainable idea of perfection
- Inspired by Khloe Kardashian, I asked influencers to edit my selfies.
- Influencers Sia Cooper, Urszula Makowska, and Laura Arumugam adjusted my pictures so they would look like something they would see on their Instagram feed.
- I also tried out editing app FaceTune on one selfie, and it ended up being my most-liked photo on Instagram ever.
- Editing can be fun, but it's also a slippery slope.
- If you rely too much on apps like FaceTune, you might end up just living a lie, which is detrimental to our body image and self-esteem.
About four weeks ago, Khloe Kardashian posted a series of selfies that everyone completely lost their minds over. "Location: under b----es skiiiinnnnn," she wrote in the caption underneath three pictures where she looked like an entirely different person.
A plastic surgeon told Insider it looked like she could have had a nose job, filler injections, and fat removal in her face to make such dramatic changes. But it could also just be editing apps like FaceTune, which have gotten so sophisticated it's sometimes hard to tell when they've been used.
I've never used photo editing apps before, so I put on some makeup for the first time during lockdown, took some selfies, and downloaded FaceTune. About 60 million people in total have downloaded the second iteration of it, Facetune 2, and to be honest I can see why. It's really easy to use and I was quickly entranced by how minor changes made me think my face looked 100 times better.
Tiny changes feel huge, even though others may not notice at all
I edited my jawline and lips to soften them and make them into shapes that I think people generally consider more attractive. I smoothed my skin to get rid of any fine lines and under-eye bags, the existence of which apparently devalue me as a human being, and brightened my eyes. To someone else, these changes might seem tiny, but to me they were huge.
I posted to selfie to my private account where I don't have too many followers, but it ended up being my most-liked photo ever. I couldn't help but wonder whether I would have received such compliments if I'd posted the natural, unfiltered one, and what such a mindset might be doing to our mental health.
Editing is huge in the influencer industry. So much so, it's more or less assumed that every photo has had at least a slight touch up. Tana Mongeau, for example, is a big celebrator of FaceTune, sometimes editing herself beyond recognition, and even encouraging her fans to do it too.
She told Insider's Kat Tenbarge that she's a perfectionist, but understands that it's easy to get caught up in only wanting to put an image out into the world that's perfect.
"I look at a photo and I'm always in my own head like 'I wanna make this look the way I see it in my head,'" she said. "If there's a person in the back, I want to patch them out. If my skin isn't smooth, I want to smooth it. But you can definitely get really trapped in that mindset, and I think it's important to not take it super seriously."
Due to my lack of photo-editing experience, and its popularity among influencers, I enlisted some to help make my selfies Instagram-worthy. It was mostly out of curiosity for how different they could make me look.
They used a range of apps, including Perfect 365, Lightroom, and BeautyCam, which provided quite an array of results.
I look nice, but I don't look like me
Urszula Makowska, who has 240,000 Instagram followers, told Insider she basically always edits her photos before posting them — "the lighting, the contouring, everything," she said.
"I always make my top lips bigger, my nose smaller, my under-eyes smooth, cheekbones, contour, all of this stuff," she said. "Little minor changes make a big difference."
She adjusted my selfies to turn them into photos she would post on her own feed, which is highly curated. She made my lips bigger, used an airbrush tool on my skin, and fixed my contour and under-eyes. She even changed my hairline and gave me a "pop of lip color."
"I took off the contrast and I took off off the shadows to give it that Instagram feel," she said. "It's like you're outside like kind of a little bit more boho, I guess that's my style, my taste."
I can totally see the appeal of posting photos that are so nice to look at. But my overarching concern is that while it's a nice picture, it's just not a picture of me.
Makowska said she feels like she has to edit her photos now, especially as she works with brands that expect "perfection."
"I'm selling the clothing label, so I have to look ideal," she said. "So sometimes I'll thin myself out, even though I'm already thin, or make myself look taller, even though I'm really short in person because the clothes will look better.
"I want to make sure that it looks as perfect as possible because they're also paying me to do that."
Using the blur function meant Makowska then transitioned into wanting to look that way in real life, and she started getting botox and filler at a really young age. She thinks it all probably stemmed from the influencers and celebrities who set the agenda of how women should look.
"With social media comes this ideal of how beauty should look, especially with like key celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, GiGi Hadid, and the Kardashians," she said. "They set the milestones. So people look at them and they have such a large influence in the world and on people that everyone wants to look like that."
The problem is we're all tweaking and Photoshopping our pictures to try and meet this unattainable standard of beauty. We're chasing an impossible goal, but hardly anyone is honest about it.
"It's all around this ideology about this is how we should look, and that's how society sees it," Makowska said. "It's sad, but that's how we see it."
Everyone in the industry is editing their photos
Laura Arumugam, who has 76,000 followers, edited a couple of my photos by slimming my face, making my eyes bigger, and radically changing my hair color. She told Insider she has seen photo editing apps explode in popularity as Instagram has grown, and she puts it down to this pursuit of perfection.
She started using them basically because everyone else in her industry was, despite not particularly liking the over-enhanced look.
"Some influencers I personally know have sworn the more they edit their photos the more Instagram likes they get, regardless of how unnatural the photo looks," she said. "While everyone around me in my industry was enhancing their photos, I couldn't help but feel like I was missing out."
What started off as curiosity soon became a "slippery slope," Arumugam said, because she started to feel vulnerable when she would edit out her imperfections.
"There I was, looking at a considerably 'better' version of myself, deciding if I should actually delete the photo," she said. "Or I can keep this photo; potentially post it, essentially manipulating the reality of myself. Manipulating myself for Instagram, my followers, and even for me."
Editing can go from fun to damaging incredibly quickly
Her changes were minor, but it was enough for Arumugam to feel "slightly disgusted" with what she was doing. And it only took a few months for her to start completely distorting her appearance.
"I was frustrated with the pressure to edit my photos, frustrated with how it was affecting my mental and emotional state," she said. "Most of all I was frustrated with how tempting it felt to keep going further once I started editing a photo. In some ways, I can see how photo-editing apps can become addictive or at the very least an unhealthy crutch."
Arumugam noticed the negative impact on her psyche pretty quickly, and shifted her focus to a healthy lifestyle with plenty of water and exercise. That made her feel infinitely better than trying to warp reality with an unrealistic Instagram selfie.
"I needed to reaffirm to myself that I am enough just the way I am, blemishes and all," she said. "I realized that some of my unique physical attributes are what make me most attractive and help me stand out."
She rarely takes selfies anymore, but if a client asks for one she makes sure she resists the temptation to open any of the apps. Similarly, she tries to steer clear of editing her body too much, but only because she's not a professional and there are far too many stories out there of botched Photoshop.
Like many of us, Arumugam is still on a journey to appreciate her natural looks, reminding herself often of the other qualities she holds.
"I hope more models can do the same," she said. "Many of us have a lot more to offer and shouldn't put so much weight solely on our physical appearance."
Over-editing is like living a lie
Sia Cooper, who has 1.1 million Instagram followers, has been a fierce advocate for the body positivity movement. She's tirelessly called out social media's body image problem of highly edited photos making us feel like we're not good enough, and shown how the "perfect" body type is all basically a myth because it changes every decade.
She told Insider the amount of people who download editing apps "just shows you how insecure each one of us really is about our bodies."
"Every time I do a FaceTune, and put before and after photos on my page, a lot of women are like, 'Ooh, what app is this?'" she said. "They're like, 'Oh we're just curious,' but deep down inside I know they're wondering what they'd look like if they tweaked this or edited that, which is only natural."
Cooper used an app on my selfies which can generate an entire face of makeup. She said small things like a teeth whitening tool or some false eyelashes is where it starts, but then the adjustments gradually get more and more extreme.
"I think that it's detrimental," Cooper said. "There was a time when I got obsessed with it, and I was just like, what am I doing to myself? I'm living a lie."
Cooper thinks it's likely prominent celebs and influencers all have their photos edited, and it's important they "stop using that sh-t so much."
"It's OK to let a pimple show, it's OK to let cellulite show," she said. "I just feel like it's a tool, and you can use it in a bad or a good way, but I don't think there's a whole lot of good that comes from FaceTune."
'We can fall down the rabbit hole of trying to look perfect'
I've struggled with my body confidence while in lockdown, which could be because I'm spending more time with myself than ever before.
It could also be because of an increased tendency for a psychological concept called "self-objectification," which author Virginia Sole-Smith previously explained to Insider as like having a constant narrative in your own head about the way other people are seeing you.
"The concept essentially means imagining a camera crew following you around all the time, and obsessing over what you look like to other people," she said. "Women are taught from childhood that this is always a part of how we enter the world, that our physical presentation matters just as much as anything we're saying or doing, and so we have to constantly be aware of that."
Cooper also had a go at changing my body shape, and I could immediately see how larger boobs, a flatter stomach, and thinner arms made my fairly boring photo more conventionally attractive. It made me realize how widespread adjustments like this probably are. If everyone else looks beautiful and toned, and it's so easy, why wouldn't you copy them?
"We can fall down the rabbit hole of trying to look perfect," said Cooper. "People don't want to admit it because they don't want to be accused of being fake. I used to do it and I didn't tell anyone."
Therapist and YouTuber Kati Morton told Insider the younger generation is probably struggling more with the comparison element of social media, because they are growing up with an onslaught of perfectly edited photos wherever they look.
"They are even less equipped to manage the constant bombardment of people's lives looking perfect and bodies looking perfect," she said. "For you and I, we're adults and can realize that a photo could be Photoshopped. But when we're younger, we don't have that ability. We're still developing, we're trying to figure out who we are."
It's uncomfortable enough going through puberty, with all the physical changes that come along with it, she said, let alone trying to compare yourself to an entire world of beautiful people.
But there also might be some hope of Gen Z being more involved with TikTok and YouTube, which are vastly less edited than Instagram because they are video platforms. And followers may be more appreciative of the natural look than influencers think — they just have to build enough trust to upload their real selves.
Arumugam, for example, thinks keeping a natural, realistic, and consistent image of herself is not just helpful for her own mental health, but her followers' too.
"Contrary to the belief of many influencers and models in my industry, there's a part of me that believes my followers prefer to see me post photos of myself raw, unedited, and real," she said. "I think at the core they want to see me for who I am, not for who I am after being edited. Honestly, I can't blame them for that."
I'm not keeping FaceTune. It scares me how fun it was seeing my lips grow and my jawline chiseled, and feel the instant gratification of the likes flooding in. I enjoyed playing around with it, but I feel a bit ill whenever I look at the photo I edited. It's not really me, and I don't want to learn what it's like to feel like I'm lying to myself whenever I post a picture on Instagram. There's enough dishonesty on there as it is.
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